Designed to lower the total cost of ownership and enable increased availability and reliability, the Qsan Q500 array series features 16G FC and 10GbE ISCSI connectivity options, dual controllers for high availability, SSD caching and a range of enterprise features, all running on an energy efficient Intel Briarwood platform and dual 80 Plus Gold power supplies.

The latest 12 bay models of the Q500 feature a new Qsan technology Copy-to-Flash(C2F). C2F takes power protection a step further by using the reserve power of the battery backup module to save RAM contents to non-volatile flash memory stores when power is lost. Compared to using a battery backup alone, C2F offers longer and more reliable data protection when power is lost.

Using the superiority of SSDs which offer exceptionally high speed, SSD caching technology provides the best way to fulfill cost-effectively the high performance and capacity requirements of enterprise applications such as enterprise web with database, cloud and virtualisation. As a hybrid HDD and SSD solution, SSD caching gives the benefits of both storage mediums.

The Q500 system features dual active storage controllers for high availability as well as fully redundant and modular hardware components including dual power supplies to ensure high availability. It offers multi-pathing and load balancing as well as hardware RAID for enterprise performance and reliability.

Qisoe and Fcqisoe are exclusive Qsan technologies which offload storage protocol operations to hardware, increasing host storage performance. ISCSI and Fibre Channel offer high network bandwidth but they create storage protocols overhead on the host. Qisoe for ISCSI and Fcqisoe for fibre channels are hardware offloading engines that can transfer the storage protocol overhead to hardware and improve storage performance.

The Aegissan Q500 system supports comprehensive virtualisation technologies including VM ware VAAI, Citrix and Hyper-V. With VAAI certification; the disk array can offload server and network loading, speed up provisioning of new virtual machines and increase VM density. The array also provides its 'QThin' thin provisioning feature so that organisations can avoid allocated but unused storage and be able to purchase only the disk capacity they actually need. In addition, it has plenty of value add-ons such as writeable snapshot (Qsnap), remote replication (Qreplica) and battery backup module (BBM).